Great Lines
The purpose of this thread is to record great lines from books. They do not have to be funny (which is why I avoided calling them "one liners"), but just a sentence or phrase from a book that nicely encapsulates a thought or just strikes you as being Well Said.
To start us off on the most inauspicious note possible, I give you a line from a pulp novel featuring "The Shadow." The house name of the author is "Maxwell Grant" but it comes from The Shadow's primary author, Walter B. Gibson:
How wonderful! A man so observant that he didn't see! The phrasing is perfect to highlight the disconnect in the thought: an observant man who does not observe.
Do you have a favorite line from a favorite author that you would like to share?
To start us off on the most inauspicious note possible, I give you a line from a pulp novel featuring "The Shadow." The house name of the author is "Maxwell Grant" but it comes from The Shadow's primary author, Walter B. Gibson:
The Black Master (1932), Maxwell Grant, Chapter 7.Warfield continued to watch him. In fact, he was so observant that he did not notice another man who entered the lobby.
How wonderful! A man so observant that he didn't see! The phrasing is perfect to highlight the disconnect in the thought: an observant man who does not observe.
Do you have a favorite line from a favorite author that you would like to share?
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Faust, surprised at seeing him there, asks, 'Are you not in Hell?' to which Satan replies, 'Why, this is Hell, nor are we out of it'.
Some folk appear to bring their own private hells with them.
I have more ...... the game's afoot .....
Terry Pratchett, "Snuff".
“On the dance floor, half a dozen couples were throwing themselves around with the reckless abandon of a night watchman with arthritis.”—Playback
“She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.”—Farewell, My Lovely
“It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.”—Farewell, My Lovely
“He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.” —Farewell, My Lovely
“Tall, aren’t you?” she said.
“I didn’t mean to be.”—The Big Sleep
“Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.”—The Big Sleep
“You’re broke, eh?”
“I’ve been shaking two nickels together for a month, trying to get them to mate.”—The Big Sleep
“Alcohol is like love. The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl’s clothes off.”—The Long Goodbye
“She had eyes like strange sins.”—The High Window
“From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away.”—The High Window
Here is one that I have found useful to quote on multiple occasions:
"I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn't know."--Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, Chapter 6
"I don't want to wrong anybody, so I won't go so far as to say that she actually wrote poetry, but her conversation, to my mind, was of a nature calculated to excite the liveliest of suspicions. Well, I mean to say, when a girl suddenly asks you out of a blue sky if you don't sometimes feel that the stars are God's daisy-chain, you begin to think a bit.”
You've reminded me to try to find my big volume of collected Chandler that I leant to someone who might (...) have given it back. Great stuff.
“It is an amazing thing to watch people laugh, the way it sort of takes them over. Sometimes they really do struggle with it . . . so I wonder what it is and where it comes from, and I wonder what it expends out of your system, so that you have to do it till you're done, like crying in a way, I suppose, except that laughter is much more easily spent.”
“It is a good thing to know what it is to be poor, and a better thing if you can do it in company.”
...but the whole book is packed with memorable lines, which kind of hit me -wham-, -pow- like something out of Batman - I don't think I can remember being so moved when reading a book. That sounds silly for such a quiet story, but it really did.
[/tangent]
From Robert Harris's Pompeii:
"What was leadership, after all, but the blind choice of one route over another and the confident pretence that the decision was based on reason?"
(I find this unsettling, and am not sure I agree, but have remembered it from the first time I read it years ago.)
And @LatchKeyKid, yes, another great bit of Chandler.
I’m reminded this morning of a line from Ferrol Sam’s Run with the Horsemen, a line I’ve quoted frequently:
“He’s a good boy, he takes instruction well; I just can’t think of enough things to tell him not to do.”
“The telephone bell was ringing wildly, but without result, since there was no-one in the room but the corpse.”
Chandler was a genius. This is exactly what the Santa Anas feel like. The wind here typically comes off the ocean and is cool, so it feels weird and wrong when it's blowing backwards and making you hot. People call it earthquake weather, though we all know the weather doesn't cause earthquakes. It just feels like disaster is imminent.
‘Mrs Flushpool looked like a loose collection of black plastic bags filled with water tied together with string’
Adrian Plass, ‘The Sacred Diary of Adrian Plass’.
Adrian Plass is awesome!!
—The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, by Clive Staples Lewis, who decided he would be “Jack” at the age of four, and kept that name for his friends for the rest of his life
(Technically “Jacksie” at four, and “Jack” thereafter)
I think I remember the context - it meant 'let's chip-in towards the fuel costs of so-and-so who turned up to address our church meeting'. Plass claimed to have heard this one, as I remember, rather than making it up to illustrate a point.
In the sense of turning abstract nouns into verbs, perhaps some Christians in the 80s were somewhat prescient of contemporary management-speak. It might have been a 'word of knowledge'.